William Burns on American Diplomacy

WILLIAM BURNS, AUTHOR, “THE BACK CHANNEL: A MEMOIR OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY”: I think you’re right. It’s theoretically possible but it seems to me the focus of our NATO relationships right now ought to be on the core purpose of NATO, alliances like NATO or what sets the United States apart from lonelier major powers in the world, like China and Russia. And what the president has done over the last couple of years, I think, has sold a lot of doubt in the minds of our traditional European partners in NATO, as well as Canada, about our commitment to that alliance. And so, it seems to me our focus ought to be more on reassuring them as opposed to raising kind of straight questions about new formal NATO members like Brazil.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: OK. So, let’s dig down now into the substance of your book, because it is all about these allies is that you’re talking about, whether it’s NATO alliances or other broader alliances of the United States. And you, I think, believe after a 33-year career as a diplomat, that even before Donald Trump the idea of diplomacy was sort of decaying on the vine. What do you mean by that?

BURNS: Well, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that President Trump didn’t invent the drift in American diplomacy. After the end of the Cold War, when the United States really was the singular dominant player in the international landscape, we became a little bit complacent, we cut the budget for the State Department and foreign assistance over a decade or so, intake into the American Foreign Service was reduced quite a bit at the tail end of the 1990s and then, of course, came 9/11, a deep shock to our system. And the tendency after that to invest even further in the military and intelligence tools as opposed to diplomacy. So, that drift has been going on for a while. I would argue however, and this is what I try to lay out in the book, that over the last couple years in the Trump administration the White House has taken that drift and accelerated it and made it infinitely worse. And I think that’s not an abstract problem, that comes at real cost to them — to the United States at a moment on the international landscape when diplomacy matters more than ever. We’re no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. Our alliances – – our capacity to build coalitions is a huge asset, and I worry that we’re squandering that.